The Midnight Garden

“There is a luminosity in the lights and velvet depths to the darks that can take your breath. It is simply not present in the work of any other photographic artist. I have never seen platinum prints I have been so tempted to touch; I want to actually feel those dark, textured leaves, to really enter DeCosse’s garden.”

— Photography critic and writer, John Wood

Cy DeCosse’s floral photographs have often been described as magical — and never more so than these in his exhibition Midnight Garden. These are flowers few people ever see—blooms that open at dusk and, like enchanted beings in fairy tales, disappear before the morning’s sunrise. Cy captures the evanescent beauty of 18 of these little-known flowers. The printed images are made in platinum, a medium that perfectly captures the luminous quality of moonlit beauty emerging from darkness.

Platinum brings out the barely visible patterns of the flower petals and leaves while not detracting the viewer’s focus from the brilliant white flowers. The subtle textures and infinite shading of light and dark achieved with platinum enhances the mysterious feeling of this magical garden glimpsed by moonlight.